Kane and the Barbarians

 Cover art believed to belong to Ballantine Books

 It was Gil Kane's work that introduced me to Sword and Sorcery. In my last post, I looked at the super-heroes for which the former Eli Katz is best known: Hal Jordan, the Atom, Mar-Vell. But this was an artist who once had the rights to Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian, in the late Sixties.
 During the pop culture boom of the 60s, I understand that pulp heroes flooded the paperback market. They were snapped up by a young readership who had already taken Tolkien to their hearts. Stan the Man, ever hip to the tastes of his core audience, was looking to reach college students and his aide de camp, Roy the Boy, a former English teacher, exploited the fantasy boom in several late 60s Marvel comics:

 Subby goes Sword and Sandal; the X-men find Frodo Lives

In 1970, the work of young British artist Barry Smith, formerly a Kirby imitator, was unveiled with a startling twist of Art Nouveau and aesthetic influences like Aubrey Beardsley.

Marvel had also featured other Conan-type heroes in the mainstream superhero books in 1970:

Perhaps these barbarians were sent to test the water. Famously, Chamber of Darkness features the Smith-Thomas prototype Starr the Slayer. Even Steranko had a barbarian hero prepped in the brawny shape of Talon:

 Created for and rejected by Marvel, the fools!

While I was aware of Conan (purely as a Marvel property) from the house ad above in Fantastic Four, I wouldn't encounter him in the funny pages until 1971 and this issue from Glasgow's Queen Street Station:

It was violent, downbeat and there was bloodshed, semi-nudity and swearing (of the antiquated kind). I was hooked. Something about those unspeakably ancient lost worlds of the pulps, with their Cecil B. DeMille exoticism and decadence and horror and, most of all, the moody hero spoke to me.
I bought Conan comics as often as I could but, until the md-70s, they were quite rare in the Central Belt while the b/w reprints (or more precisely red and green reprints) flourished. The giant ape issue, again with a cover by Kane, hails from Stranraer and our holiday in Sandhead in 1972 - a village I revisited during the Easter holidays of 2010. The giant bat issue, from the landward shop in Glasgow Airport:

 They're visceral and striking images. Conan the Barbarian had won awards for the intricacy of Smith's baroque pencils; this was lurid, sensational stuff by comparison and hugely popular. DC retaliated with adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Weird Worlds, which seemed to put the emphasis on the monsters.

Compared to the melancholy Cimmerian, immortal John Carter is a bit of a dud, character-wise, and even when embodied as sweaty Doug McClure, David Innes of Pellucidar is a stuffy Edwardian. Carson of Venus even rhapsodises about shaving cream, by Crom! After a brief run of ERB, Howard Chaykin's sci-fantasy series Ironwolf took over. It was too ornate and complex for my tastes at the time although I recognise it's a classy piece now, chock-full of Steven Moffatt's favourites, pirates and vampires. Ironwolf is quite a Celtic hero too: he wears plaid and his wooden spaceship is the lyrically-named Limerick Rake:

I read  Fritz Lieber's Swords of Lankhmar from Strathaven Library and found it too twee and mannered for my liking; I haven't read any of DC's Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser stories consequently. The Conan rip-off Claw is too slavish to deserve any space here but Ditko and Levitz's Stalker had a whiff of the eerie and tragic.

Rothesay 1975.

 Thanks to Conan, Thomas, Smith and Buscema, the Barbarians were storming Marvel too:

 This very short story introduced me to King Kull. As yet, I hadn't heard of Captain Marvel's caveman opponent:

The letters page also compared several monsters from the Conan series to Tolkien creations. Tolkien posters and memorabilia could be spotted here and there-especially, once, a Roger Dean-style poster in a shop in Ayr. I was therefore on a collsion course with The Lord of the Rings.
Kull is a more contemplative series: its themes are identity, conpiracy and the corruption of civilization. The Severin siblings create a lush, ornate world that seems more fabulous than the Hyborian Age but where Kull is more cerebral, I didn't care about him very much. The sorceror Thulsa Doom (a bizarre figure with a death's-head) is more charismatic from his first appearance. Any relation to Victor Von?


Gil  Kane, meanwhile introduced us to Marvel's own version of John Carter, updating a 1905 adventurer with a Viet-vet backstory; and to another Burroughsian feature:

 

Interestingly, the first Sword and Sorcery property Thomas went after was Lin Carter's Thongor. Allegedly, Stan thought the name was more Marvel-lous. Steranko and Kane provided some of the covers for this patchy series, which had a typical Bronze Age merry-go-round of talent. Didn't they realise that's what helped kill books like this?

Thongor is a two-dimensional hero. The most memorable thing about him is that, mid-way through his brief Marvel Career, he became a red-head. Lin Carter's books meld Howard's barbarian king with the lost science of Burroughs' Mars. There's a touch of the Flash Gordons about Thongor and Carter rehashes the same motifs over and over in his fantasy worlds: the noble savage tribesman, the sardonic swordsman, the ugly faithful thief, the plucky son/ward/squire and the beautiful but personality-free heroine. Villains are either cultists, sybarites or pirate kings. Somtimes, there's a scientific super-villain, like the Black Archdruid Mardanax or the Mind Wizard, Ang Chan (not an Oriental mastermind at all, then).

Of course the success of Conan and the nature of the material lent itself to Stan and Roy's line of black and white comic magazines for "mature" readers. Comic artwork often does look better in black and white but it was the proximity of these Marvel products to True Detective and other spicy periodicals that sold me on them as a twelve-year-old:

 The Bran Mak Morn story by Tim Conrad is astonishingly beautiful and creepy. But it was Conrad's map in that first issue that captured my attention (and led to my eventual purchase of the Atlas of Fantasy above-twice).
I feel I have to point out that, even from the perspective of the Seventies and more so from today, the original REH stories are repetitive and appallingly racist.The colour comics in art and script often employed wit and humour but the lurid and gory stories from Weird Tales tended to be fairly faithfully adapted. But embellished by Alfredo Alcala, Buscema's pencils were magnificent. I can't describe how I pined to buy "The Slithering Shadow" issue of Savage Sword in its British reprint from the wood-panelled bookstall in Central Station.

The last and perhaps most signifcant spin-off from Cona was Red Sonja, the celibate swordswoman in the impractical but iconic chain mail bikini:

Frank Thorne's European style was quite a departure for S&S comics, as was its firebrand heroine; this was no swooning princess, handmaiden or slave girl. The world she inhabited had a rich, detailed, almost Renaissance look. There was nothing else like it at Marvel.
Marvel's most slavish imitator, Atlas Comics launched two S&S books; the legendary Ironjaw, a sadistic post-apocalyptic series and Wulf, an anodyne adventurer:

Always was a sucker for a sword and sorcery map.

Why was Sword and Sorcery so successful ? There's definitely an erotic component-one that was exploited to the ,er, hilt in the execrable Richard Blade/Dimension X paperback series. The scantily- clad heroes and heroines are both vulnerable and titillating. Also, there is a Gordian Knot- style directness to the protagonists' actions. They became popular in an era of ecomomic uncertainty and political chicanery so the appeal of just beheading the conniving and treacherous is compelling. Then there's the pulpish cliffhanger adventures and the exoticism of lost or alien worlds. And monsters. There have to be monsters.

Why did it fall out of fashion so quickly? After the Reagan era, perhaps the barbarians seemed too unsophisticated and lacking in irony. In our country, sword and sorcery was inextricably linked to Metal, to Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying games: the many-sided die and graph paper hopelessly nerdy and unfashionable. Perhaps now that we're living through a recession again and our taste for apocalyptic futures has been revived in film and tv, however, those sandalled feet might tread the jewelled thrones of Earth (or Barsoom) once more.

In the second installment, I'll recall the paperbacks of the late 70s in more detail as well as some of my recent ebay purchases in the genre.
Next: Barbarism Begins at Home.

The Legal Bit: all images are presumed copyright of their respective owners. This is a blog for nostalgia, fun and comment, by Valka.